Report Searches for “Wokeness” Terminology to Justify Deregulated School Choice," by Drs. Christine Sleeter and T. Jameson Brewer

For those wanting to draw a connection between wokeism—or the "anti-woke" movement and school choice, read this downloadable assessment of a Heritage Foundation manuscript titled, Empowering Parents withSchool Choice ReducesWokeism in EducationJay P. Greene, PhD, and Ian S. Kingsbury, Ph.D. 

Drs. Sleeter and Jameson Brewer critique this as relying on cherry-picked data and bias. In short, it is a, in their words, a "shoddy advocacy report."

-Angela Valenzuela

Report Searches for “Wokeness” Terminology to Justify Deregulated School Choice

Key Review Takeaway: Shoddy advocacy report attempts to justify deregulation of the charter school sector for the purpose of decreasing “wokeism” in charter schools.

Find Documents:

Publication Announcement: https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication-announcement/2023/01/wokeism
NEPC Review: https://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/wokeism
Report Reviewed: https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2022-11/BG3735.pdf

Contact:

Alex Molnar: (480) 797-7261, nepc.molnar@gmail.com
Faith Boninger: (480) 390-6736, fboninger@gmail.com
Christine Sleeter: (831) 915-3876, csleeter@gmail.com

Learn More:

NEPC Resources on Politics, Policy, and School Practices

BOULDER, CO (January 24, 2023)—In one of the more unusual reports NEPC has ever reviewed, Heritage Foundation authors recently argued for school-choice deregulation by comparing the amount of “wokeness” terminology in parent/student handbooks in U.S. charter schools with the level of charter school regulation in their states.

Christine Sleeter of California State University Monterey Bay and T. Jameson Brewer of the University of North Georgia reviewed Empowering Parents with School Choice Reduces Wokeism in Education and found significant flaws in reasoning, even beyond the report’s disconcerting premise.

The Heritage report finds that increased manifestations of “woke” terminology are associated with higher state levels of charter school regulation. On this basis, the report concludes that while charter schools represent a safe space away from “woke indoctrination” in public schools, further deregulation and less bureaucracy will allow the charter sector to truly respond to parent desires to avoid “leftist” curriculum.

Notwithstanding its provocative thesis, apparently intended to tap into current turmoil, the report has at least five significant weaknesses. It assumes that parent/student handbooks are good proxies for curriculum; it completely ignores the diversity of parents and relevant research about what large proportions of parents actually want; it conflates correlation with causation; it relies on undefined conceptions of what constitutes “wokeness”; and it possibly uses cherry-picked data and methods that suit ideological bias.

These shortcomings render the report useless for understanding or developing policy. Instead, the report serves merely as an example of strategically employing dog whistles and fear, embedded in shoddy methodology for the sole purpose of affirming a solution (school choice) in search of a problem (“wokeness”).

Find the review, by Christine Sleeter and T. Jameson Brewer, at:
https://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/wokeism

Find Empowering Parents with School Choice Reduces Wokeism in Education, written by Jay P. Greene and Ian S. Kingsbury and published by the Heritage Foundation, at:
https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2022-11/BG3735.pdf

NEPC Reviews (http://thinktankreview.org) provide the public, policymakers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected publications. NEPC Reviews are made possible in part by support provided by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice: http://www.greatlakescenter.org

The National Education Policy Center (NEPC), a university research center housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education, produces high-quality information in support of democratic deliberation about education policy. We publish original research, policy briefs, and expert third-party reviews of think tank reports. NEPC publications are written in accessible language and are intended for a broad audience that includes academic experts, policymakers, the media, and the general public. Visit us at: http://nepc.colorado.edu

The Misguided Push to Reintroduce Standardized Testing During the Pandemic

Important read. I fully agree with Dr. Lorrie Shepard who says that testing students in this time of COVID is misguided and harmful, particularly for lower-income families and bilingual students from lower-income families. I recommend folks take a look at 

Ibram X. Kendi's piece titled "Why the Academic Achievement Gap is a Racist Idea," so that you can situate socially constructed, racially-biased "achievement" in historical perspective and grasp its ideological underpinnings that mirror race relations in our country and beyond.

If we all really cared not only about equity in this country but a growing demographic of Latinx, Latino, Mexican American, African American, Indigenous, Native American, and Afro-Latino peoples, then let's perhaps think, write, and talk about reframing things.  Instead of having an assessment system that is premised on "what 'these children' lack," let's imagine all of this differently. Radically differently. By this, I and many other scholars, organizations, and policy makers would prefer an asset-based system, premised on the wealth of their communities, languages, dialects, cultures, communitarian values, and so on. It is also partnership-based,  social justice- and community-oriented, ideally anchored in our communities. They should be about parent and community empowerment, as well as about revitalization.

 

In my realm of the world, we call this decolonizing. For those outside of, or distant from, either this experience or these discourses, the idea of respecting others' dignity would be an appropriate interpretation of this posture that is calling for us to pivot. Not to any orthodoxy, but to create a new infrastructure for education that is itself about revitalization and renewal.

The "diagnostic purposes" for giving these exams simply doesn't hold up—particularly since results are rarely available until the following year. In tandem with this piece, I recommend reading this article by Valerie Strauss titled, "Why teachers shouldn’t give kids standardized tests when school starts." 

To the arguments presented herein, I would like for us to additionally consider the impact of paper-and-pencil tests on the environment. They are a bioburden that perpetuates risk to humans by the number of trees and forests that have been destroyed to generate these tests worldwide, together with the chemicals released into our nations' waterways in the production of paper that according to this piece, titled, "Environmentalists: Paper mills likely major source of chemical pollution in waterways," this kind of wastewater correlates with testicular cancer and thyroid disease.

I would think that environmental groups would be raising such concerns. And if they aren't. They need to.  

The larger issue related to testing is that there are too many (in Texas, we also have end-of-course exams) and invalid when used as measures on which to make high-stakes decisions like retaining children in grade or whether or not children should graduate from high school.  Even the makers of the tests themselves make such disclaimers.

If we're going to continue testing, we should abolish census testing that tests everyone and adopt sample testing as policy like the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).  Fewer, online, sample-testing-based assessments is thusly the way to go, however, not during a pandemic.

-Angela Valenzuela

@algore #InconvenientTruth @EnvironmentTex @SierraClub @TexasSierraClub  @TXWaterFuture #OneWaterTexas #gogreen #testing #sustainable #SustainabilityTexas @EnvDefenseFund #ClimateEmergency 

#ExtinctionRebellion #climateaction, #environment #nature #climatechange #ClimateDenial #sustainability #ecofriendly #savetheplanet #green #zerowaste #earth 

This past spring, after schools closed to limit the spread of the coronavirus, all 50 states, Puerto Rico, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the District of Columbia were given permission by the U.S. Department of Education (ED) to suspend or cancel their K-12 accountability testing—something that hasn’t happened since 1994, when federal law first started requiring annual exams. With schools set to resume in the weeks to come, it’s still not clear how many buildings will actually reopen. As of July 23rd, more than three quarters of district leaders said they planned to offer a mixture of in-person and online instruction but, as death tolls rise, more districts are announcing each day that 100 percent of learning will be remote as the fall semester begins. Amid this uncertainty, a smattering of policymakers, educators and advocates are calling for a resumption of statewide testing. In early July, for instance, Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath announced that students would be required to take the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STARR) exams in 2020-21. A few days later, Florida Department of Education chief of staff Alex Kelly told district leaders that there were no plans to seek a waiver from federal testing requirements for 2020-21. Moreover, after leaders in Michigan, Georgia, and South Carolina did request that ED grant testing waivers for 2020-21, the department’s leadership indicated that no waivers will be forthcoming. The justification for resuming during a pandemic has been that the exams are needed for diagnostic purposes. As Assistant Secretary at ED, Jim Blew, said, “Accountability aside, we need to know where students are so we can address their needs.” Similarly, Morath, the Texas Commissioner, told state school board members, “Educators, unless they have some other robust assessment … can’t adjust our educational support of kids accordingly.”  Yet statewide exams are not appropriate for diagnosing learning needs for individual teachers and students. Instead, they are designed to assess state, district and school-level efforts to cover a broad set of state standards. In fact, teachers rarely even receive the results until their students have moved on to the next grade level. For this reason, education officials and advocates in several states say that so-called “diagnostic assessments”—not the summative exams required by federal law—should be administered when schools resume. For example, 10 education advocacy groups led by Denver-based A+ Colorado, called for state leaders to spend federal CARES Act funds to administer a “statewide diagnostic tool” to every K-12 student in Colorado. Their letter mentions an assortment of off-the-shelf, “well-established and widely-used” “diagnostic assessments” listed in a reportby Education Reform Now, a nonprofit advocacy organization.  Ultimately, Colorado Education Commissioner Katy Anthes said that the state would not use a single diagnostic tool to assess student readiness when school resumes, because this approach would “distract districts from focusing on critical fall reopening priorities, result in unnecessary duplication, and not necessarily be aligned to local curricula.” Nevertheless, the idea of using such a one-size-fits-all tool for diagnostic purposes is likely baked into school reopening plans throughout the country. For example, the School District of Osceola County, FL will administer NWEA’s MAP exam three times this school year as a “diagnostic tool” and “approach for diagnosing unfinished learning,” according to the 69,000-student district’s state-approved reopening plan. And California’s 16,000-student Cajon Valley Union School District has purchased Curriculum Associate’s i-Ready virtual diagnostic tool to diagnose student learning in English/language arts and math at the beginning of the school year. Yet National Education Policy Center Fellow and University of Colorado Distinguished Professor and Dean Emerita, Lorrie Shepard, says that a single, uniform, off-the-shelf tool cannot provide the information that teachers need to meet students where they are and teach them what they need to learn.

To be truly diagnostic and useful to guide the next steps in instruction, assessments need to be closely tied to local curricula, in both content and timing, and they need to be responsive to strengths children bring from their homes and communities,

Shepard wrote in a June letter to Colorado education officials. She added:

The computer-delivered test products referenced in the A+ Colorado letter provide quantitative scores about how far behind or ahead students are (one grade level or two) on broad subtest dimensions such as Number and Operations or Algebra. To permit immediate, machine scoring, these products include only multiple-choice or short-answer test questions. As a result, they do not provide insights into children’s thinking. They have not been built, as are more fine-grained diagnostic assessments, to identify students’ misconceptions.

The Colorado advocacy groups and others calling for the use of a one-size-fits-all diagnostic tool contend that equity is their goal because educators need to measure the disparate impact of remote learning on emerging bilinguals, students from lower-income families, and others who traditionally been poorly served by the educational system.  Yet Shepard writes that a set of uniform assessments would disproportionately harm these very students:

At this time of national trauma, we should not forget that tests have a long history of being the cause of inequity rather than a resource for educational opportunity. For decades, tests – first IQ tests and then achievement tests – have been used to sort children of color and English language learners into low-track classes where learning opportunities and outcomes have been worse than in regular classrooms…. Colorado can do better than to greet its most vulnerable students with tests specifically designed to quantify their deficiencies.

Although A+ Colorado and its partners do not suggest using diagnostic tests to retain students in grade, other Although A+ Colorado and its partners do not suggest using diagnostic tests to retain students in grade, other commentators have already proposed doing so, Shepard observes. Cumulative research results suggest that retention is more harmful than helpful and that it is disproportionately used on students of color. This could compound the assessments’ impact on equity. How, then, should teachers pinpoint students’ needs when school resumes either in person or online? Here’s what Shepard suggests:

The sound advice of national curriculum leaders such as Student Achievement Partners has been to use prioritized content standards to scaffold students to grade-level content as quickly as possible. Such an instructional approach can best be supported through the use of open-ended instructional tasks to help identify learning needs in ways better attuned to children’s social-emotional needs. Teachers can, for example, invite children to read and talk about grade-leveled texts, with particular attention to phonological awareness, vocabulary, and comprehension. In mathematics, richly scaffolded performance tasks are available as well as curriculum embedded assessments that can be used to elicit children’s thinking as well as mastery of prerequisite skills. Importantly, these activities do not take time away from instruction and they place teachers in a helping role with their students at the outset of the school year, rather than in an evaluative or judgmental one. This is a more equitable and effective approach than the endless, objective-by-objective remediation that would likely follow from interim assessment results.

Shepard also wrote about these issues in a statement posted at Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet for the Washington Post. NEPC Resources on Assessment ->

This newsletter is made possible in part by support provided by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice: http://www.greatlakescenter.org

The National Education Policy Center (NEPC), a university research center housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education, produces and disseminates high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. Visit us at: http://nepc.colorado.edu

The Saturday School Where Mexican American Children Learn About their Heritage: A Q & A with NEPC Fellow Angela Valenzuela

So happy and honored to get featured in the newsletter by the National Education Policy Center.  Very timely as yesterday was our first day back.

Thanks to Dr. Kevin Welner and Holly Yettick for featuring Academia Cuauhtli.

September 17, 2019

Learn More:NEPC Resources on Multilingual and/or Multicultural Education

NEPC Fellow Angela Valenzuela discusses Academia Cuauhtli, a Saturday school where fourth graders learn about indigenous Mexican and Mexican American culture, history, language and experiences, all through a social justice lens.

To continue reading, click here.

Who "Gets" to Be Bilingual? [Compliments of the NEPC]

Who “Gets” to Be Bilingual?

The Seal of Biliteracy has social justice roots. Promoted by Californians Together, a non-profit coalition supporting educational equity, the Seal was initially intended to demonstrate the value of bilingualism by attaching a prestigious credential to the diplomas of students who demonstrate proficiency in two or more languages by the time they graduate from high school. There was a special, though certainly not exclusive, focus on demonstrating the linguistic assets (rather than the deficits) that emerging bilinguals bring to the table. Yet as the Seal has spread to other states, a recent study suggests the program may have strayed from its equity-based origins in that it privileges native English speakers. The study found that students of color and students from low-income families are less likely to participate than students who are white and/or from higher income families. In the Q&A below, NEPC Fellow Beatriz Arias discusses the Seal in the context of broader trends affecting emerging bilinguals in the United States. Arias is former Vice President and Chief Development Officer for the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL), a nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC. Currently she is a Senior Research Scientist for CAL. Arias is an emeritus Professor at Arizona State University with expertise in policy issues for Latinx students, including bilingual education and school desegregation. Q: What are “Seals of Biliteracy?” How did they come about? Recent research has found that schools with higher percentages of students of color and students from low-income families are less likely to participate in Seals of Biliteracy programs. Why do you think this might be occurring? A: The Seal of Biliteracy is an award placed on the student’s high school diploma in recognition of achieving bilingual proficiency. The Seal of Biliteracy program began in 2011 in California as a collaboration between the California Association of Bilingual Education (CABE) and Californians Together. The goal was to give recognition to students’ linguistic accomplishments and add a tangible benefit to being bilingual. The Seal becomes part of a student’s high school transcript and is a highly visible recognition of success. By 2017, 30 states and the District of Columbia had adopted the Seal. That number has continued to grow since then.  Some states have been very successful in promoting the Seal. In 2018, 11 percent of California’s graduating class attained the Seal of Biliteracy. However, there is concern about unequal access to the language curriculum and to the assessment required to qualify for the Seal. Each state determines the criteria for the Seal, and in most cases, requires successful enrollment in advanced language classes. Schools in wealthier neighborhoods tend to have a more comprehensive world language curriculum in comparison to schools in poorer neighborhoods. For instance, they may have the opportunity to take more advanced language courses that are not necessarily offered in lower income communities with fewer resources. This gives them an advantage when it comes to obtaining the Seal. Also, the exams approved for the Seal are those developed for more commonly taught languages such as Spanish, French and German. Less commonly taught languages such as Hmong, Malayalam, and Navajo do not have comparable exams. Consequently, native speakers of these languages may not be able to take the exams required to earn the Seal. Additionally, Emerging Bilinguals (EBs) sometimes have higher hurdles to earn the Seal because the criteria for earning the Seal mandate that ELs also pass English-proficiency tests—holding them to a higher standard in their second language (English) than native English speakers. These two factors can impede the access of EBs and low-income students to the Seal.  Q: You referred to “Emerging Bilinguals.” In recent years, many people in this field have shifted from speaking of “English language learners” (ELLs) to speaking of “Emergent Bilinguals” (EBs—which is the term we use throughout this newsletter). What is the thinking behind this change, and does it reflect actual policy and practice in the classroom?  A: The field is leading a shift in the terminology used to define English Language Learner and how that learner is perceived, moving from a deficit-based term to an asset-based term. “English Language Learner” limits and focuses the identification of students in terms of their English proficiency. In the past, the terms for Emergent Bilinguals have emphasized their limitations and deficits: “Limited English Proficient” and “Non-English-speaking” were terms that were used officially. But this terminology presents a stigmatizing picture of EBs, defined by their limitations in English: non and limited.  A fresh focus on a new term, Emergent Bilingual, puts an emphasis on the students’ assets, their bilingualism and their potential for growth. This terminology helps teachers recognize students’ dynamic bilingualism and develop pedagogical practices that are consistent with an understanding of children’s home language practices. Teachers are developing innovative ways to include community language in their classrooms. By focusing on EBs, teachers can develop more rigorous instruction and challenging material. For parents and communities looking at the child through the lens of assets, the term EB brings attention to home language use and parents’ role in language learning. Click here to read the rest of this Q&A.

The Seal of Biliteracy has social justice roots. Promoted by Californians Together, a non-prof-

it coalition supporting educational equity, the Seal was initially intended to demonstrate

the value of bilingualism by attaching a prestigious credential to the diplomas of students

who demonstrate proficiency in two or more languages by the time they graduate from high

school. There was a special, though certainly not exclusive, focus on demonstrating the lin-

guistic assets (rather than the deficits) that emerging bilinguals bring to the table.

Yet as the Seal has spread to other states, a

recent study

suggests the program may have

strayed from its equity-based origins in that it privileges native English speakers. The study

found that students of color and students from low-income families are less likely to partic-

ipate than students who are white and/or from higher income families.

In the Q&A below, NEPC Fellow

Beatriz Arias

discusses the Seal in the context of broader

trends affecting emerging bilinguals in the United States.

Arias

is former Vice President and

Chief Development Officer for the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL), a nonprofit organi-

zation based in Washington, DC. Currently she is a Senior Research Scientist for CAL. Arias

is an emeritus Professor at Arizona State University with expertise in policy issues for Latinx

students, including bilingual education and school desegregation.

Q: What are “Seals of Biliteracy?” How did they come about?

Recent research

has found that schools with higher percentages of students of color and stu-

dents from low-income families are less likely to participate in Seals of Biliter-

acy programs. Why do you think this might be occurring?

A:

The Seal of Biliteracy is an award placed on the student’s high school diploma in rec-

ognition of achieving bilingual proficiency. The Seal of Biliteracy program began in 2011

Tuesday, September 24, 2019

Newsletter

http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/newsletter-arias

1 of 6

This Teacher Evaluation Trend Was the Reform Du Jour. Now States Are Backing Away

I certainly hope that all states back away completely from this—not even as bill proposals that are distracting of other more important proposals related to teacher pay, working conditions, student learning conditions, teacher retention, turnover, and the like.  

After all that we know—and have known—about high-stakes testing, what a horrible direction to have gone in the first place. Just saying...

-Angela

This Teacher Evaluation Trend Was the Reform Du Jour. Now States Are Backing Away

SHARE THIS EMAIL: Florida stopped requiring districts to do it in 2017. The New Jersey Department of Education announced in August that it was reducing its reliance on the practice. And, 20 years after it was first introduced in Wyoming, the practice was eliminated entirely this year by that state’s legislators. A decade after the now-defunct Race to the Top grant competition dangled a financial carrot to entice legislatures throughout America to adopt teacher evaluation policies that rely on student test results, the about-face is picking up speed. Even the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—which poured $700 million into initiatives related to teacher evaluations related to student performance—announced in 2017 that it was pivoting away from the practice.  But researchers, including those at the National Education Policy Center, raised caution flags early on. In 2006, when advocates of using students’ standardized test scores to evaluate teachers were enthusiastically trumpeting the approach, NEPC Fellow Edward Wiley wrote a practitioners guide that identified multiple concerns about so-called “value-added” models that use longitudinal student achievement results to assess teacher performance. Teachers are not randomly assigned to classes, and some groups of students are more likely than others to exhibit growth, regardless of the quality of their instruction in a particular school year. Student achievement tests tend not to be designed to evaluate teachers. And assessment errors may also impact results.  “Notwithstanding the federal enthusiasm for test scores, many researchers have warned against using a single measurement of any kind as the primary basis for such important personnel decisions as teacher retention, dismissal or pay,” Fellow and Pennsylvania State University emeritus professor Patricia Hinchey wrote in an NEPC policy brief published in 2010. She added:

While there are important questions about what achievement scores can—and cannot—indicate about individual teachers, there is no question that placing excessive emphasis on test scores alone can have unintended and undesirable consequences that undermine the goal of developing an excellent teaching force.

As districts and states end test score-based evaluations, what should they do instead? In a recent Kappan article entitled Learning from what doesn’t work in teacher evaluation, NEPC Fellow Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, an associate professor at Arizona State University, and her co-author Kevin Close offer some good advice. Their recommendations include using multiple measures to evaluate teachers, emphasizing formative assessment, and including teachers in the development of evaluation approaches. “If policy makers learn from the mistakes of the recent past, then they should be able to design teacher evaluation systems that are consistent, valid, fair, and useful,” they conclude. NEPC Resources on Teacher Evaluation ->

This newsletter is made possible in part by support provided by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice: http://www.greatlakescenter.org

The National Education Policy Center (NEPC), housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education, produces and disseminates high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. Visit us at: http://nepc.colorado.edu

Copyright 2018 National Education Policy Center. All rights reserved.